a review i wrote. load of wank it may be but i'm not wasting it.

Perhaps it is the empty beer bottles congealing on every window ledge; or that the School’s maze of corridors is practically deserted when I arrive; or the mingled scent of paint and panic that hovers in the air, but the Slade Degree Show gives me, from the off, an eerie sense of aftermath.

Walking through the various whitewashed exhibition spaces I have the strange impression that something has exploded and fragments remain, a feeling strengthened by my early encounter with L. Wormell’s paintings - apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) landscapes, bristling with harsh, prickly, bony ribcage scrubland picked out in sanguine beetroots and aubergines, can’t help but bring to mind Paul Nash’s bomb-wrenched fields. Katherine Waller’s smashed sculptures, which leave hostile deposits of sand and glass over the floor like sinister, self-contained accidents, are a grisly complement.

In another room, more detritus: this time sawdust and spatterings of paint, from which residue arises Jason Waller’s brittle wood and fabric skeleton of a piece, walled in, on each side, by Arvindh Baburam’s haunting picturebook canvases of empty eyed monkeys and half-emerged vegetation.

One piece that strikes me is Josephine Rowntree’s A Designated Shore. A glossy semicircle of azure paint, a shining postcard rack, rectangles of transparent soda-orange Perspex tacked to the windows, is ‘an artificial beach’, a laminated pamphlet informs, ‘provided by the government’. Its accompanying commentary (‘you meet a young woman, she is enjoying an ice cream which is melting slowly’) forces a ghostly imagined identity from the piece’s plasticky, barren, disinfected wasteland, making it both dead and alive, viewer as mediator.

Rowntree’s piece in particular speaks to me in its brazen need for viewer, antagonist, participant. This is a desire that inevitably, unsurprisingly, characterises the entire degree show. Around the perimeters of the exhibition space, Tim Bouckley and Shing Tat Chung’s slimline wooden furniture-sculptures patiently incite an encounter – in particular Window Stools, that, haphazardly positioned by a makeshift pine-clad radio box that churns out crackling drum & bass, form a ready-made recreational zone that seems just vacated, just waiting to be entered again.

Though the Slade’s show inevitably displayed works of varying accomplishment, and some spaces were not as carefully curated as they could have been, my imagination was captured. To reflect back upon my first impression, I suppose the degree show is ostensibly an ‘aftermath’ - that of the creative process. But at the same time it is a new beginning, conceived in the act of communication – and here were some very promising beginnings.